1. Easy to file - You don’t walk over to a filing cabinet and start building one everytime you need to put a document in, the first time perhaps you add an index card or a new colour tag, but mostly you open a drawer and put a document inside. Hopefully it’s in the right place too.
2. Easy to retrieve - Ok, this is a hard comparison, as long as number 1. is done correctly, then it should be easy to retrieve the document.

Well, I think I covered the main points. That is how easy document management software should be, and it will be, just watch this space!

Because I don’t use Sage - I first used excel, and now use my homegrown invoicing software - when I create my invoices I total up the amounts, multiply by 0.175 to get the VAT amount and multiply by 1.175 to get the Total. I then cunningly round up using the method I was taught at school, ie 0.5 or higher becomes 1 (and 0.05 becomes 0.1) - also known as the symetric implementation.

Bankers rounding is slightly different, but statistically better. It’s also known as round to even, which does describe the workings a lot better - ie, 3.15 becomes 3.2, and 3.45 becomes 3.4. Bankers rounding also seems to be the default when programming (more on this later…)

Now on to Sage…

Sage uses bankers rounding Sage uses symetric rounding, but it also rounds the VAT amount per line. This can cause a difference between Sage’s VAT calculation vs multiplying the subtotal by 0.175.

 Eg,

So which is right for VAT purposes? Well, they all are. As long as you stick to one method and don’t mix and match. Personally, I’m sure that HMCE would prefer the last method as it can net them an extra 1.74p per £100!

 Ah well, lesson learned, and 90 mins wasted redeveloping the accounting side of my custom software to match up with the values Sage will give on export…

 UPDATE:

Well, after spending hours last night checking my code and putting orders through sage and checking the amounts with my system I realised something - the utility I use to transfer data from my system into Sage appears to calculate the VAT itself based on the products tax code - clever I hear you say - well, my program uses symmetric rounding, Sage uses symmetric rounding… This utility uses Bankers Rounding, not good, and I’m not happy.

Well, today I found the answer, and surprisingly I must have seen it a million times….

Right-click an empty space on the taskbar, or the system clock and Task Manager is available from the pop-up menu!

http://www.asda-electricals.co.uk/shop/product/sony/-dat.html?

One thing I never imagined Asda selling. I just hope they do a great discount on RME cards when they get them in!

Well, we’ve finished phase one of our automated service and invoicing system - which as it stands doesn’t mean much (although it does mean that I can produce invoices a lot quicker than before!) - however phase two allows service call / order information to be added and signed for via a PDA which means that:

1. You the customer receive an instant email detailing work done.
2. I receive a signed order form right to my accounting system. 

Also in development:

• Document Management system. Paperless office with full text searching and custom fields.
• Salesforce appointment scheduling system.
• Desktop editor for the CMS we were developing (probably end up as an image uploader)

And that’s all I can let out of the bag at the moment!

After some research on the newsgroups, I found that the problem seemed to occur after using the SBS 2003 R2 client installer on a windows 2000 machine - not good, especially when adding a new computer using the wizard resulted in a popup on login that would only go away if you gave in and didn’t click postpone!

So, how to fix the dll problem, well, simply copy it back to the system32 folder? Nah, Windows 2000 has Windows File Protection in place, and that coupled with the fact that mscvrt.dll is used quite a lot and is 99.9% likely to be in use makes it a hard problem to fix. Oh, and did I mention that the error message might not relate to msvcrt.dll but in fact to one of the other dll files from the VC Runtime?! Aarghh…

Anyway, long story short I created a batch file that fixes the problem. It contains the important dll files from the last Visual C Redistributable and a couple of batch files. Download, Extract and run FIX.CMD and your error should be gone!

(Please note that I cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by the use of the fix - it has been tested and works with the system I needed it to work with!)

Well, I think I found a solution - not for production though, as I’m sure it violates Microsofts Windows EULA:

1. Boot into Windows
2. Start the Upgrade from a RETAIL copy of XP Pro
3. When the system restarts, replace the retail cd with the oem cd

And hey presto, an upgraded XP Home OEM

Kind of a moot point really, as XP is going away to the nursing home - ah, how we’ll miss you…

Fix:

I’d noticed earlier in the day that I couldn’t “view source” from
within internet explorer. Deleting the temporary internet files fixed
this, and also fixed the above problem in Outlook 2007.

Update: This seems to only fix the problem a few times, hopefully a Service Pack will be available that will fix this!